Using Twitter to Forecast New Applications for Unemployment

A surprising number of people filed initial claims for unemployment benefits last week, at least if you believe an index based off Twitter.

Economists at the University of Michigan have developed a technique that scans billions of tweets, looks for people tweeting about losing their jobs and then creates a prediction for the Labor Department’s weekly report on initial filings. Their prediction: 342,000 people filed new claims for jobless benefits last week.

Their algorithm analyzes the vast fire hose of Twitter and can pick out tweets like this: “2011 was interesting. I ended an engagement, got laid off, started a small biz, and it looks like I’ll be moving this year too. Whew!” (That’s an example the economists used in their paper, among those identified as “job loss” tweets.) Add all those up, figure out how tweets translate to jobless filings, and you have a formula for making a prediction.

Twitter is somewhat more pessimistic than economists, who predict 320,000 people will file. About 311,000 filed the previous week.

The even more interesting question — how many engagements were broken off last week? — remains unanswered by the paper.

We’ll check in Thursday, after the official report, to see how the prediction fared and if Twitter was right that we should be pessimistic.